Stones of Aran Read online

  Pausing at the crest of the escarpment, it takes a few moments to ascertain one’s relationship to the suddenly opened vista. The cluster of a dozen cottages and bungalows is a few hundred yards down to the left, the north-west. Its background is an oval expanse, of sea or of sand depending on the state of the tide, almost enclosed by long levels of dune-fringed grassland. A congregation of grey, standing forms is gathered on a knoll on the nearer rim of this bay, the gravestones of St. Enda’s ancient cemetery; from here they appear to float above the roofs of the village. Above them again, out beyond the western rim of the bay, a child has left a toy aeroplane; as one watches it teeters forward a little, turns and sniffs the wind, gives a puny growl, and takes itself off—one identifies it as the Aer Árann ten-seater—into a tremendous sky that has a tiny dark blue panoramic replica of Connemara’s mountains all along its foot. The road that passes just below the village goes by the graveyard and the airstrip and disappears into the crumpled patchwork of Cill Éinne’s walls and roofs nearly a mile away, among which the old castle ruin shows as a dark stain. In Cill Rónáin harbour, another mile away and on the far side of a further bay, breadcrumb boats maneouvre at a matchstick pier. The town itself is a spill of lozenges, some of them scattered up the treads of the hillside beyond.

  In this perspective the terracing of Árainn’s northern flank is very clear; the island is visibly carved out of a small number of enormous beds of limestone laid one upon another. The geology is so simple in its nakedness that the lacy ribbon of habitation laid along it appears as a passing fancy, a frivolity, a plaything. And yet the pattern of settlement also has an impersonal structure to it; the two abstractions twine together in some paradoxical geometry of tenderness. One aspect of this relationship is obvious as soon as one begins to descend from the ridge-line and drops out of the prevailing south-westerly wind; the scarp-slope of the island offers a degree of shelter. Almost every one of the villages has its heart, its original core, snuggled into a concavity of the escarpment. At Iaráirne the ridge is quite low, but it rises close behind the village, and to the west a slight but distinct swelling of the slope tempers the wind to the old cottages and the modern bungalows occupying old sites; the newer houses off to the right and left forego this advantage, for the sake of privacy or the view. In other parts of the island houses have recently been built on heights not previously settled, and not only do they look uncomfortable and irremediably bleak, but unmannerly towards the landscape, disdainful of its hospitality. Admittedly, the degree of shelter to be enjoyed anywhere in Aran is small; in Iaráirne, for instance, it is obviously difficult to grow trees, and its two bent mountain ashes perpetually mime a westerly gale. But the traditional sites of settlement were determined by the coincidence of various small amenities of the rock, as I shall show, and while modern building technology may liberate us from this determinism, it can deafen us to old harmonies between house and land.

  If the cardinal directions of the Aran field system are given by the joints criss-crossing the limestone, to understand the situation of the villages one has to descend into the third dimension of the rock and consider its natural horizontal partings. This dimension is time-wise; it arises from the succession of deposits on the Carboniferous sea floor. Sundry geographies came and went during that era, untrodden, unwritten-up, and were reduced to distinctive layers of sediment. In the sequence of Aran’s strata, the nearly horizontal beds of limestone are interleaved with thinner layers of shale. Where a hillside now cross-sections one of these it is visible as a dark band, usually two or three feet thick, with the limestone rising above it in a steep scarp or a cliff ten to twenty feet high. In places the shale seems to have been eaten back so that the impending limestone overhangs and shadows it. For instance that track leading down into Iaráirne—it is called Róidín Mháirtín, Martin’s little road, no doubt from the same shadowy figure whose name is attached to the broken-down tower further east—runs along the top of a north-facing grassy bank. At one point a few trodden footholds lead down from it to a recess almost under the róidín itself, from which the hart’s-tongue fern sticks out its long pointed fronds, and cool water lies in a small stone-lined basin below a thick ledge of limestone. A few flattish stones lie at the rim of the basin like uncomfortable kneelers before a shrine; if you stoop and peer under the great limestone altarpiece you see the shale at the back of the recess. It glistens with moisture, and it comes away in horizontal flakes when you pick at it. It looks like the edge of a huge mouldering book, shut forever by the weight of rock above it, and in fact it is the history of one of those fleeting lands whose hills were weathered away and carried off as mud by rivers, and piled in layers on the sea-floor during the gestation of Aran. There are about eight such shale-beds running right through the body of the island, very nearly level but with the same slight dip to the south-south-west as the limestone. On the Atlantic cliffs they show as slots and ledges etched back into the rock-face by the waves. The very highest cliffs are divided into four stories by these recessed string-courses. On the northern side of the island the land steps up from shore to ridge-line in abrupt slopes or cliffs separating broad levels, and the same shale-bands crop out along the feet of these risers.

  These north-facing scarps are hospitable to human settlement as well as to fern growth. The spring well by Róidín Mháirtín is Tobar Iaráirne, and it is the proximate reason for the siting of the village nearby. There are good green pastures all along the foot of the scarp here; a skim of soil weathered out from the shale-band has added to the attractions of the locality. The correlation of shelter, water and soil along particular levels of the island suggests the thought that all possibilities of life derive from material differences, just as electric currents are powered by potential differences. In Aran the difference is that between limestone—rigid, susceptible to fracture, soluble in water—and shale—plastic, foliated, impermeable. The joints of the limestone, enlarged by erosion down to a certain depth, do not penetrate the shale-bands. Therefore the rainwater they swallow off the surface is channelled laterally through the web of fissures until it seeps out of a scarp-face, trickling down the shale exposure and filling any natural or artificial basin at its foot, before overflowing and disappearing into the grykes of the next terrace, reappearing as another line of springs below the next scarp, and so on until it reaches the sea.

  But why are there these scarps? Their formation obviously has to do with the different resistances to erosion of the alternating layers of limestone and shale, but the processes by which a hillside is sculpted into steps are not known beyond argument. Limestone exposed to weathering on a hillside will tend to degenerate into loose blocks, which further erosion (and perhaps glaciation) would eventually annihilate, whereas the limestone protected by a shale-layer will stand firm; one can imagine the terraces being roughed out in this way. On the other hand the shale itself is vulnerable to attack along its exposures, and just as on the sea-cliffs it is gouged out by the waves to leave grooves along the cliff-faces, so in many places it is being worn back under the inland cliffs, by weathering and perhaps by the spring-water perpetually washing out over it. The overhang of fractured limestone will eventually collapse, and in fact along many of the scarps there are huge fallen blocks of limestone. This rubble no doubt protects the shale for a bit but breaks down in the end, allowing the process to recommence. Thus once a scarp is formed it will slowly recede; in fact the whole sequence of terraces and steps will gradually bite its way back and consume the hillside. Something similar is happening on the Atlantic coast, where the cliffs, pounded by winter gales, are an ongoing catastrophe. On the northern slopes, however, sapping and ruination proceeds on a time-scale that human beings can live under; indeed it is the ground of their existence.

  Because Cill Éinne bay takes a huge bite out of the eastern third of the island, reducing it to less than a mile across, the sequence of scarps and terraces is not fully developed here. Most of the other villages have terraces below them as well
as above, but Iaráirne is unique in that immediately to the north of it is a wide tract of sandy land just above sea-level. Na Muirbhigh Móra, the big sea-plains, it is called; ecologists would describe it as “ma-chair,” from a Scots-Gaelic synonym of muirbheach that has been adopted into their terminology. Its smooth ground-hugging sward is a closely-woven web of plant-species resistant to salty winds and heavy grazing. Together with its long north-easterly extension, Barr na Coise, it is commonage, shared in proportion to their other land-holdings between about a dozen households of Iaráirne, and used for grazing dry cattle in summer. Milk-giving and calf-bearing cattle are kept in the meadows of lush grass watered by the springs under the scarp, handy to the village. Sometimes one sees the beasts galloping madly around these little fields, tormented by warble flies that puncture their skin to lay eggs in their flesh, edible housing for the grubs. This is another reason for not keeping the cattle on the crags in summer, where they would be more likely to break their legs in the grykes. But in winter the crags have the advantage of being well drained and comparatively dry underfoot, and as in this mild oceanic climate cattle do not have to be brought indoors they are wintered on Na Craga, and get by on its sparse grass and the occasional sackful of mangolds. (I am told, however, that the poor slóchtaí, the cattle brought in from Connemara for the winter, whose keep was paid for in turf, would spend it on the open commonage—though their Connemara owners may not have been aware of this frugal arrangement.)

  Thus the economy rotates around the village like a year-hand on a clock, turning the land to best advantage with the turning seasons. Wells like Tobar Iaráirne are crucial to the mechanism, though since the village is now piped up to the mains coming from the big reservoirs behind Cill Rónáin, they are only used for watering the cattle. (When I revisited the well to refresh my memory recently, I found its water full of what looked like handfuls of chopped lettuce. I brought a bit of this stuff home to identify: Aneura pinguis‚ a liverwort. Liverworts, obscure denizens of wet and shady places, absorbing their nutriment directly through their leaves, and, having no roots or interior canals, rank below flowering plants in the Whig view of evolution. They are not a life-form that had much caught my attention previously, so I note here that Tobar Iaráirne not only supports Homo sapiens but also houses this other creature, and no doubt a thousand others to whose life-cycles I am oblivious.)

  The róidín by the well long predates the main road, which was extended to Iaráirne only in this century. West of the well it winds down the scarp and enters the village without much changing its half-grassy half-stony nature; indeed the terrain hardly alters either, as there are little hayfields and tillage-plots between the houses, and overgrown empty sites where long-gone cottages have mouldered into craggy mounds. Coming from above in this way, one takes in the village by its roof-tops. The nearest is a dishevelled straw thatch sprouting thistles, nettles and yellow ragwort flowers; beyond it are old grey cement tiles, modern curved red tiles, thunder-blue slates, and—the very newest—a pin-sharp reed thatch that curves over an upstairs dormer window and has a decorative trim along the roof-ridge. The boreen branches within the village; each way leads down to the main road, and the little circuit knots together most of the houses, except for two recent bungalows that have strayed along the road to the east, the reed-thatched house isolated in the fields to the west and, a hundred yards beyond it, a guest-house that has recently expanded almost into a hotel, called Ard Éinne, Enda’s height, on the hillside above the old cemetery. One cottage has a little garden with eight-foot-high tree mallows brought over from the cliffs, a red rambling rose, nasturtiums, and by the doorstep a big clump of bloody cranesbill on which the baby’s bibs are spread out to take the sun. In the lee of one of the taller gables two Pittosporum, an evergreen shrub that does well on the western seaboard, have attained to tree-height. The long thatched cottage at the top of the village turns out to be disused except as an outhouse, and all the surviving cottages have had their thatches replaced with something less laborious in the upkeep. The smart reed thatch of the isolated house is of a style promulgated by government-funded craft training schemes, and this is its first appearance in the island; it makes one think of prosperous English villages, and has nothing in common with the shaggy Aran thatch roped down to pegs beneath the eaves like a woolly cap pulled well down over the ears in the face of the storm.

  Iaráirne—the name is rather puzzling since at first hearing it seems to mean the western or back part (iar) of Aran, or of a ridge (ára). There is a similar puzzle about the name of the easternmost of the Aran Islands, Inis Oírr, pronounced very much as if the last element were iar. In the latter case the solution is clear. In some early sources the island is called Ára Airthir, the Aran of the east, or Inis Airthir, the island of the east. (For instance the Annals of the Four Masters record that in 856 the High King of Tara burned and plundered Munster and carried off hostages from every corner of it. One of these corners is specified as Ára Airthir; presumably the other two Aran Islands were considered to be in Connacht.) The more modern spelling, Inis Oirthir, first appears in the seventeenth century in Roderic O’Flaherty’s West or H-Iar Connaught. Since the word oirthear (oirthir is the genitive case) is not in use in Aran speech, it has been corrupted and simplified until hardly distinguishable from a word meaning the exact opposite. The same has happened in the name Iaráirne, which presumably started out as Oirthear Áirne, meaning the eastern portion of Aran. It is curiously easy to slip from east to west in the phonology of several European languages, in which north and south are kept poles apart. Perhaps the distinction between north and south, between shade and sun, winter and summer, demands so much commonsense from us, that the practical outweighs the symbolic; the other, the east-west journey travelled so quickly by each of our days, resonates with concerns we prefer not to articulate too clearly. From Aran, evening after evening, we see how the glorious career of the sun only serves to paint it into a corner, so that it has to escape down a mouse-hole into some cellar of the world in which, whatever its state, it is no longer the sun. Perhaps east and west are the names of buried hopes and fears that betray themselves in this slip of the Indo-European tongue.

  All but one of the houses of Iaráirne have their longer axes east-west, and this orientation is dominant throughout the island. In my early years in Aran I took it that this pattern represented the alignment of the houses with the main road, which on the whole runs east-west, and was probably due to some bureaucratic ideal of neatness imposed by the planning authorities, so when a family in Cill Mhuirbhigh consulted my aesthetic sense in the siting of their bungalow I had them put it at an angle to the road; the result is disconcerting now that I understand that the pattern long predates the road. The island itself provides the level terraces running along its northern flank on which the villages have developed, and these have origins vastly senior to all human custom, as I have shown. However the alignment of individual houses answers not only to the topography and to meteorology, but to a complex mystique of westernness. Occidentation, rather than orientation, would be the best word for this simultaneously domestic and otherworldly compass bearing.

  The houses of Iaráirne nearly all derive either by multiple extensions or by replacement from thatched cottages of the nineteenth century or earlier, and inherit their orientation from a tradition common to most of the west of Ireland. Several of these cottages were joined together end to end in twos or even threes, to save the building of a gable, and in such cases one could be sure that the westernmost cottage was the oldest. Dara Ó Conaola, a writer born in Inis Meáin and now living in Inis Oírr, explains this in his account of the richly meaningful simplicities of Aran’s domestic architecture:

  Nothing was built onto the west of a house because “Fear níos fearr ná Dia a chuireadh fad as an teach siar” (“Only a man better than God would lengthen his house to the west”). It was thought that anyone who did that was showing he had no respect for God, and that no luck would come to him
out of it. I never heard what the reason for this belief was. I suppose that it was because in the old days people thought God was in the west. In the pagan times they worshipped the setting sun, and the idea stuck in their minds long afterwards. That’s only what I think myself, but it stands to reason.

  Front and back of these cottages were the same; the two doors were opposite one another, and which was in use depended on the way the wind was blowing.

  These houses were no wonderful palaces but they were comfortable enough. They were thought-out and suited to the times and the surroundings. Their design was simple enough—an oblong, with two walls and two gables. There was a door in either wall. There weren’t many windows because at that time even sunlight was taxed! One of the doors would be left open to do the work of a window as well as that of a door. It was called the sheltered door (doras an fhascaidh), or the open door, and the other was called the wind door (doras na gaoithe) or the closed door.

  In Aran, keeping the driven rain out of the house during a gale is not easy, and the wind door often has old sacks stuffed under it, with a length of plank or something similar to hold them in place, and opening it is not just a matter of turning a key. Again before I knew about these things, when calling on an islander I would knock at what I took to be the front door because it was the one facing the road, and sometimes there would be an obscure shout from within, which I gradually came to understand as “Doras eile!” (“Other door!”). But the next time, if I went round to the back, I was just as likely to get the same response, the wind having changed.